In high speed parallel print job processing, two modes are known in the art: one form is known as “page parallel”, and the other is known as “job parallel”. As described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,161,705, an intermediate form of parallelism is “chunk parallel. Job parallel processing has the advantage of efficiency: if there are enough jobs available, each of a collection of processors may operate on its own job, without interference from the others. Any startup overhead incurred on a per-job basis is incurred only once per job. On the other hand, page parallel operation has the advantage that an individual job is typically completed sooner than in a job parallel system, and the speed advantage of parallelism is available even if there is only one (multi-page) job to print. With chunk parallel printing, chunks of jobs, comprising an integer number of pages, are processed in parallel. With more than one page per chunk, the amount of startup overhead is reduced, while retaining the advantages that multiple processors are active despite there being as few as one job in the system.
Published US patent application number 20040196496 describes a page or “chunk” parallel printing system. The system comprises a printer, a plurality of processing nodes, each processing node being disposed for processing a portion of a print job into a printer dependant format, and a processing manager for spooling the print job into selectively sized chunks and assigning the chunks to selected ones of the nodes for parallel processing of the chunks by the processing nodes into the printer dependant format. The chunks are selectively sized from at least one page to an entire size of the print job in accordance with predetermined splitting factors for enhancing page processing efficiency. The system further comprises a supervisor processor for estimating the work time required to process a chunk based upon selected data determined from the splitting of the print job and for load balancing the print jobs across the processing nodes. Further background information for the present disclosure can be found in U.S. Pat. No. 6,817,791 describing an idiom recognizing document splitter; U.S. Pat. No. 7,161,705, describing a parallel printing system having modes for auto-recovery, auto-discovery of resources, and parallel processing of unprotected postscript jobs; and, US patent publication number 20040196497 describing a parallel printing system having flow control in a virtual disk transfer system. Patent publications 20040196496 and 20040196497, and U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,817,791 and 7,161,705, are incorporated by reference as background information.